Whenever I try to wear earphones, I spend more time attempting to fit their rubbery tips snugly in my lugs than I do untangling the ever-knotted spaghetti junction of cable. Designers have battled for years to tackle the issue, but with a "Diaphonic Lens" they may finally have the solution.
These miniature balloon-tipped …

sounds promising

Bluetooth??

Bluetooth sound quality is improving but it cant match a good set of wired IEMs yet. I had a play with the Jaybird Freedom Bluetooth IEMs at Gadget Show live and they are pretty awesome but I'm still a sucker for my Shure SE530s.

Thanks for that reminder!

Just ordered myself some TX-500 for my UE TripleFi 10. The defaultl silicon (or whatever) buds are OK, but over time they become much less grippy, even with cleaning. Hopefuly the Comply foam stuff do the trick.

but on the other hand they will make you deaf...

Ambrose and colleagues presented a paper on these headphones at the AES 130th convention in London this weekend[1]. At the same conference they also gave a paper on the dangers of reproducing sound in a closed ear canal, and how it can cause serious damage, as well as causing timpanic membrane excursions in the order of 1000 times greater than would normally be seen[2]...

So yes, they have created a nice piece of tech that can easily block out back ground noises (and what isn't mentioned is that the greater the background noise, the greater the inflation of the envelope, so the greater the isolation), but at the same time they have also said that blocking the ear drum is bad....

@paul_murphy - the whole point being that you wont need noise cancellation if you can get a good enough seal in the ear canal so as to block out back ground noise... noise cancellation is for headphones or poorly isolating earphones... as to the cable, they could theoretically be wireless / bluetooth, but then you have to add in some bulky battery / processor unit as well as some form of interconnect between in-ear drivers and said unit... personally, that would annoy me more than having a cable (but not as much as having too short a cable that wont comfortably reach the device in my pocket....)

misheard...

Take care of the sense and the sounds will take care of themselves

It might sound better, and he might even have discovered something, but the claimed health and safety benefit doesn't make any sense. The stapedius reflex reduces the level before the sound reaches the nerves. So if it doesn't operate, more sound reaches the nerves and there is no safety benefit. And what is "discernability" if not a meaningless bit of feel-good ad-speak?